


wake the woods to sing

by maricolous



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Episode: The Adventures of the Darrington Brigade, F/F, Hopeful Ending, Light Angst, Making Out, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:08:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26498392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maricolous/pseuds/maricolous
Summary: All good things must come to an end, they say. Damian isn't sure if the Darrington Brigade is a good thing, but she knows that Farriwen is. She isn't ready for it to end.
Relationships: Damian Vadoma/Farriwen Breeze
Comments: 5
Kudos: 34





	wake the woods to sing

**Author's Note:**

> i am but a shallow lesbian with a taste for the more obscure, what can i say. also i took liberties with damian and farriwen's backstories because what good is the explorer's guide to wildemount if i can't use lore to take artistic liberties with my fic
> 
> the title is taken from the poem 'o thou breeze of spring!' by felicia dorothea hemans

Farriwen stays for a year.

The Darrington Brigade doesn’t get many jobs after the whole Quackthulhu fiasco, and recruitment is a slow trickle of people who leave as soon as they hear that the lack of salary is a real thing. The lone exception to this is an overeager thirteen year old, who looks at Farriwen and Damian in the training pit with shining eyes and who they pretend not to notice crying when Taryon gently turns her away and sends Lionel along to escort her back to Kamordah.

“I think if she got here by herself, she could do it,” Damian says, yanking up her shirt to apply a cooling salve to the purpling bruise just under her ribs. “It’s a big fuckin’ deal, leaving everything you know to adventure.”

“No one that young should find themselves needing to be on the road,” Farriwen replies, unwrapping her swollen knuckles and stretching them.

It’s hard to read Farriwen sometimes, her voice soft and gaze distant no matter the situation, but Damian thinks she’s gotten good at it in the time they’ve been adventuring. A lot of their adventuring involves the redistribution of wealth, or helping Taryon make winter care packages for the people who refuse lodgings at the Darrington estate, and Farriwen’s definitely better at that than Damian. It’s not hard, mind you. Even Buddy and Macaroni were better at it for the short time they were there, before they up and disappeared overnight.

“I mean, sometimes there’s no choice,” Damian says, leaning forward to rub some of her salve into Farriwen’s knuckles. It always tickles to touch Farriwen, with the light breeze that seems to run across her skin at all times. “Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. We all…do, you know?”

“I suppose that’s true,” Farriwen agrees.

After Buddy and Macaroni’s departure, and The Owlbear’s insistence in sleeping outside, Hazel had moved into the newly open room. It’s just Farriwen and Damian in the room now, and they sit on the floor between their beds every evening, just like this. Damian’s used to sharing a room. She’d shared with her siblings growing up, and then split time in a bed with another member of the Uttolots when she joined the family. The Uttolots are probably still waiting for her return, a year after her departure. They’re her family, in blood shed if not blood shared. At some point, she’ll have to go back.

She thinks, at the same time, that this is the closest she’s ever felt to someone.

Farriwen watches her rub the salve in, unmoving, and Damian would think she’d started meditating if she couldn’t feel the weight of Farriwen’s gaze. Maybe it’s that weight that brings her to kiss the soft skin on the inside of Farriwen’s wrist. A gentle breeze makes Damian’s bangs flutter but the soft, sharp inhale of breath above makes her press another kiss to the edge of one of the flames engraved in Farriwen’s arm.

“Damian,” Farriwen says, soft and airy and unreadable.

Damian has never wanted to match that kind of softness so badly in all her life. She doesn’t dare move, doesn’t dare break the moment.

Farriwen does it for her, cups Damian’s cheek with a cool hand, surprisingly rough for how otherwise delicate she looks. “Damian.”

Damian lifts her gaze, revelling in the third kiss she leaves on Farriwen’s skin as she does. “Yeah.”

Farriwen brings her second hand, still wrapped, to Damian’s other cheek.

When she kisses Damian full on the mouth, it feels like being swept away. Her lips are warmer than the rest of her, her tongue slick against Damian’s, and holding her is a little like trying to hold onto the breeze itself. As solid as she is on Damian’s lap, pale thighs spread across the worn fabric of Damian’s once-smart trousers, it feels like she might slip away at any moment. When Farriwen gasps against her mouth at the feeling of Damian’s rough fingers sliding up the outside of her thigh, Damian feverishly thinks of late summer afternoons in the Savalirwood, a gentle breeze rustling through the twisted trees and instilling some sense of peace despite the world being so very unsettling.

Damian would be the Erathis to Farriwen’s Melora, if only she would ask. She would follow Farriwen anywhere at this moment.

She’s left with a cold lap and a frustrated heat between her legs when one of the dogs comes nosing into the room for attention, and Farriwen turns her attention to fussing and petting it. After that, there’s little chance to talk. Dinner comes, and then The Owlbear asks her to spar and she comes out of it so bruised that she barely manages to take off her suit before collapsing into bed, Farriwen already buried under her covers against the oncoming winter chill.

She wakes up to an empty bed across from hers, and a note on Farriwen’s pillow. She doesn’t bother opening it, ignoring her lingering aches to slouch down the stairs to eat.

Taryon greets her with too much cheer, the same way he did when Buddy and Macaroni had disappeared. At least he knows. Damian doesn’t think she would have the patience to be the one to break the news. She puts her head down for the rest of the week, clumsily avoiding Hazel’s attempts at asking if Damian knew that Farriwen was planning to leave. The Owlbear doesn’t particularly care, and Lionel takes the news in his stride upon his return from Kamordah. At night, the note sits on Farriwen’s abandoned pillow, waiting to be read.

“Was it me or did I just have shitty timing?” Damian asks one night.

The note, of course, doesn’t answer.

Without Farriwen’s presence, the days get more unbearable. The Owlbear is all force and little technique in sparring, and Lionel is much the same. Hazel is practically useless, and spends most of her time in a silent war with Doty as they prepare the next volume of Taryon’s adventures for publication. The crawling itch under Damian’s skin, the one that drove her to leave the Run, comes back worse than before.

Two more weeks of passing out care packages and making small temporary fixes for big permanent structural problems around the Darrington estate are all she can bear, by the end. She packs her things in the middle of the night and sits on her bed, staring at the note, until the breakfast bell rings. She doesn’t think she learned what Taryon tried to teach her, but she’ll at least tell him to his face that she’s leaving. Damian Vadoma is many unsavoury things, but she isn’t a coward.

The look Taryon gives her makes something squirm uncomfortably in her stomach. She leaves despite it.

At the last moment before leaving, she races back upstairs to grab Farriwen’s note, and it burns a hole in her pocket the whole way to Zadash. She goes on horseback, buying one with some of what little coin Taryon was able to force into her hands, and it’s only when she’s back within civilisation that she dares to pull the note out.

“We do what we have to do,” the note reads. “But sometimes it is not easy to give up what we want for what we need. My people need me more urgently than Taryon does. They need me more than you do. But should your travels ever take you out to the Menagerie Coast, I suspect you could find a ship willing to drop you off at the Twinward Isles. I hope one day you will find your way here. Ever yours, Farriwen Breeze.”

Damian spends the next day poring over a map. The Menagerie Coast is in the exact opposite direction from Shadycreek Run, but she thinks of soft cool skin under her hands and a breeze held in her arms and decides it would be pretty fucking cool to see the Lucidian Ocean before she goes home. The Uttolots have already waited a year. They can wait a little longer.


End file.
